Idea to save VC:MP

[morphine]

post 2


Xmair:

I completely disagree with the graphics part. SA has a pretty bad looking atmosphere as compared to VC.

agreed, graphics was never really a deciding factor in any of this, especially for Vice City. even 15 years later, it still kicks ass and anyone who denies it needs medical help.

public awareness of VC-MP is what we lack.



GoRcEE:

When the gang trash talk like that, the player gets triggered and talks trash in return, which leads them being toxic and nothing else.

it's an adult, 18+ rated game. offense is part of the game, even though it probably should be regulated to an extent.

in any case, it's time to suck it the fuck up. if you don't want bad-mouthing, go watch Teletubbies or some shit like that. no offense intended.



Kessu:

Each server has it's own set of rules and if one can not obey them or outright refuses to, why should that server be dealing with the player any longer?

We play this game to have fun and some of us have created a server where we can have fun within a set of rules that gives us the best chance to have fun. We will not miss the shitstains who wish to disrupt that.

well I can't believe I am writing this but I agree with you for once, only this once.



Charley:

Can we make VC:MP look or feel better, as a game? No.

jury's out

Can we get the devs to release an update? No.

yes

Can we change the behaviour of existing VC:MP players? Not easily.

but possibly

Can we stop servers from factionalising? No.

we don't need to

Can we stop cheaters forever? No.

depends

[Charley]

not because of an actual playercount drop ( Because who cares about actually backing up your statements with data, right?).

Indeed, I've rallied against the 'VC:MP is dying' argument for years now - people were saying it was dying from the moment I joined the mod, and it was patently untrue.

But now, we actually do have data, and as Morphine pointed out, it doesn't look good. When you have 30 players in EAD, they're 95% players who have been on the mod for 3+ years already. The truth is, we're not getting enough new blood.

If by graveyard you mean inactive, I have to disagree.

For an official forum for a community as vocal as this one, the VC:MP forum is incredibly inactive. To deny it is to be willfully blind. There are scripters dropping stuff there from time to time, and beta testers occasionally contributing to and locking threads, but other than that there's essentially nothing of any value, meaning or interest.

It's mostly people just asking for the same old script support, or posting topics that should be elsewhere.

Here's a fun exercise - open all the frontpage boards in separate tabs. Look at the 'last post' column. All but one of them have posts from April and before. Some of them have posts from years ago.

Here's another one - try and find 5 meaningful or heated discussions from the past year that weren't related to scripting.

Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that the VU forum has become the unofficial VC:MP forum. But I know that, for the good of the game, it shouldn't be this way.

Your suggestion about community leaders is already happening I believe, just in a different way. Whenever there's a VCMP event people usually post on VCMP forums about it.

It's not enough. People post and get what, 100 views? And no replies? That system has been tried for more than a decade now, and it hasn't garnered good enough results.

Empty titles and ranks to do something that they're already doing. I always like to avoid more ranks/positions since that further splits up the community, not to mention the drama that comes with it.

I will grant you that there would be a bit of tension with ranks, as with any perceived hierarchy. But that tension and any consequent drama would be eclipsed by the motivational effect that ranks and recognition would have. When you give someone a title, a responsibility, a formal legitimacy, they are much more likely to actually do shit.

Another thing is that what you call community mods/admins already exist, in the shape of beta testers.

I refer you to my product developers analogy. Beta testers are not hired for community management. Their role is to test the product, they should be experts on the mechanics of the game, that's it.


P.s. Newk, the only reason I didn't include you in my list of suggested peeps is cos I thought you were inactive lol. I would have put you in 'Community Admins'.

[morphine]

Another thing is that what you call community mods/admins already exist, in the shape of beta testers. All beta testers are forum moderators.

also - (one of) two reasons why the average VC:MP player does not care about beta testers anymore:

• they are inactive
• they are silent and as 'current community administrators', don't give the average VC:MP player the consolidation in faith they need for them to rest assured that VC:MP is still alive and kicking

... which is why now the people of VC:MP have taken matters into their own hands.

gosh where have I seen and heard this before? sounds an awful lot like quite a lot of governmental institutions all over the planet

[napoleon]

first, why does a newcomer have to be a female?

and this isnt the right place sorry for going off-topic, its my fault but couldnt resist seeing a guy like napoleon a guy that came out of nowhere with high skills and claims he has no past nicks or aliases.

and no im not hostile with everyone but to those that are trying to fool the community yea i am hostile and you are the best example for that, plus you kept avoiding the questions about your past and old aliases, this is not the first time we have caught a lying cunt trying to make a fresh start after a few months or years of being inactive(lying cunts that used to cheat ,stats pad, death evading) then suddenly the lying cunt makes a fresh start being so talktative, friendly etc towards the community then gaining power and influence on vcmp.

does anyone remember the TLK.Belial/Slingshot case from some years ago? this seems like pretty much the same, oldies like charley, morphine and a few others might remember it

I just told my mind to how to save VC-MP on my first comment as you can see. and you started talking irrelevant. if you want to know who is a liar, let me tell you. a guy didnt even speak to me once and hostile to me directly. you didn't even ask me who i am. and also, i am not after gaining strength in this game. I'm just playing on my free time to have to have fun. unlike you 
if you have a idea which it contains to revive VC-MP, share your idea here, but you're here for a fight obviously. we can argue elsewhere

why are you lying again about that i didnt ask you? seems like you cant stop lying, you are acting so kind here but ingame when i asked you a few times(on EAD to be more exact) about your past you replied with " fuck off, i dont need to tell u, show proof, cry" i even used to invite you to join CTF thru pm a few times till i asked you about your past then you went mad because i was asking you what were your past nicknames and dude that is for something, it bothers you and you obviously dont like someone trying to discover your past aliases, but if you didnt have nothing to hide you wouldnt mind about it and tell the truth but that is not the case.

quit lying napoleon.

and as for the topic about how to revive VC:MP the first time i heard about VC:MP dying was back in 2010 when Windlord(cola_sky's brother) announced that the mod could be dying that year, well here we are at 2020 and yea we have had a few illuminated ppl that kept saying vcmp would die sooner or late during all these years but here we are again at 2020 with EAD server on 33/100 players the oldest and "old fashioned" gamemode we used back in the day to make Clan wars, so revive what?

VC:MP isnt dead and it wont die anytime soon, because many of us could be playing CS:GO, COD, PUBg, GTA V, Valorant and a larger list of games and say just fuck this old laggy mod from 2005-2006 but we are all here because we love VC:MP and meanwhile that love towards VC:MP remains around it wont die and of course we have amazing ppl like stormeus,cutton, adtec, morphine, krys, newk, gangstaras and many others that will keep this mod alive with their ideas, work and all of that for all of us.

But i can assure you all that VC:MP wont die anytime soon i have been hearing the same story over and over again all these years i left for 2-3 years rejoined left again for 2 years rejoined but here we are yet and yea there will be one that it will become true and VC:MP will die but thats like everything.

I would also like to give the entire VU clan the credits they deserve for having all of us in touch on their forum, which is pretty much the other "VC:MP" forum apart from the real one which lacks a lot of things you can find around here, also the VU clan deserves some credit for keeping VC:MP pretty much alive at times with events such as VW and VCDC, the VU clan may not be the best in events when it comes to win and shit but fuck winning they are collaborating on a +50% to keep this mod alive in my opinion, they have done a lot for the mod and they will surely keep working to keep it alive, so there is my little wink to you VU clan.

In this game, I speak politely to everyone. You invited me over there just to play. all you say is, "this team is full, can you go to the opposite team to make it equal?" It was. and i dont even tell you those " fuck off, i dont need to tell u, show proof, cry" words. If you suspect that I am someone else, I said show proof. You didn't even listen to me to speak. And suddenly, You told me I was someone else and liar. I politely answered everyone who asked me. I only had problems with you. I was even accepted to a tournament. if i were suspicious, I wouldn't be accepted. If you want to ask something, you can ask to ME. you can't get anything by gossiping

[ripmemes]

well I can't believe I am writing this but I agree with you for once, only this once.  ( morphine quoting kessu )

I disagree, rules are rules, players understand that and have to comply with them, but sometimes a person gets outright banned for something minor but for a long duration. not that he's not wrong or anything but the ban time is staggering.

players get hooked to VCMP (that's a no doubt) and they want to have fun in the game, some of them tend to do something stupid ( nobody is perfect ) but they get banned for at least 3 days, that's like holding defecation for them. and they lose interest in that server as they hold a feud against that certain admin. those who are claimed by stubbornness will definitely try to ban evade...
it feels bad, even worse when the ban is due to a shitty VCMP glitch.

this is a game, and people want to have fun in the game ( or compete ). I guess 2 hours up to one day ban for light rule breaks is enough.

[Charley]

Let's stay on topic boys

[NewK]

But now, we actually do have data, and as Morphine pointed out, it doesn't look good. When you have 30 players in EAD, they're 95% players who have been on the mod for 3+ years already. The truth is, we're not getting enough new blood.

There's certainly highs and lows, right now we're at a low for sure, not trying to deny that. That low can also be explained by the fact that there werent any new(public)  summer releases. Usually every summer there are new updates coming out but that hasn't happened this year, so there's not as much interest.

If by graveyard you mean inactive, I have to disagree

For an official forum for a community as vocal as this one, the VC:MP forum is incredibly inactive. To deny it is to be willfully blind. There are scripters dropping stuff there from time to time, and beta testers occasionally contributing to and locking threads, but other than that there's essentially nothing of any value, meaning or interest.

It's mostly people just asking for the same old script support, or posting topics that should be elsewhere.

Have VCMP forums ever been anything other than that though? As far as I can remember thats what VCMPs forums have always been. Dont get me wrong I'm not saying thats what they have to be, but I just don't see how having community managers will make them anything more. Especially since as I said, server/event staff already use the VCMP forum much the way you described.

When you give someone a title, a responsibility, a formal legitimacy, they are much more likely to actually do shit.

In my experience this is true, but only when you appoint people that are trying to "prove themselves", if you're going to appoint people that are already well established/achieved respected community members, I dont think they will have as much enthusiasm as you're expecting.

I refer you to my product developers analogy. Beta testers are not hired for community management.

You say that, but usually when it comes to beta testers being "hired", they're suggested by other existing beta testers who are in fact members of the community.

P.s. Newk, the only reason I didn't include you in my list of suggested peeps is cos I thought you were inactive lol. I would have put you in 'Community Admins'.

No worries, no offense taken 

also - (one of) two reasons why the average VC:MP player does not care about beta testers anymore:

• they are inactive
• they are silent and as 'current community administrators', don't give the average VC:MP player the consolidation in faith they need for them to rest assured that VC:MP is still alive and kicking

Sorry to be so blunt morph but if you actually believe that, you have no idea what you're talking about. I'm specifically refering to the part about beta testers being inactive and silent. As I said in my previous post:

And if you say say the beta testers are all inactive then you really dont use the VCMP forum at all. Because last year there were about 6 or 7 new beta testers that were recruited (myself included) and they're the ones who have been moderating the forum for the past year and testing private vcmp builds.

The new beta testers that were recruited as still very much active and communicating with the community. You think we're inactive? Here's a list of things that only happened because of the beta team:

• The fact the VCMP forum is even up right now is because we (beta testers) have been constantly talking to AdTec so he could reach VRocker to see what was happening with the server. There was even a point in time where work started being done to host a copy of the forums elsewhere because we couldn't reach VRocker.
• The fact that newcomers (people with outdated clients downloaded from moddb) can even join any server right now without replacing the updater link with thijn's mirror is because when maxorator was around we kept nagging him day after day after day for him to to point his domain to AdTec's mirror.
• The fact that this last VW ran so smoothly and without memory leaks was because long before that, we (who are supposedly silent btw) made the effort of reaching out to various people of the community (Luckshya, Xmair..) who helped reproduce the memory leak. We then made scripts based on their information to create a reproducible scenario which was then sent to AdTec who fixed the memory leak.
• The fact that after the last public rel007 beta there have been 21 new private builds that have been tested by the beta team

The (current) beta team is much more invested than you think.

[Luckshya]

VCMP is not actually dead but kinda "dead" in advertising part and newcomers.

We get a peak of around 80 players everytime for any new event. However, we reached that count because it was properly advertised and on time that created a kindof suspense for the event by looking at the "leaks" of the event as they were attractive.

For example, VW9 started a new era of cool advertisement banners in an event that also made people advertise their entity and therefore join it with all the friends and clanmates.
VCDC 6 introduced custom attractive stage and designs and a proper advertisement area that looked very attractive.
However these advertisements thingy created some problems where a community would "boycott" the event if their AD is not selected. We saw a glimpse of it in VW9.

I agree with charley's idea. VCMP needs proper management of events on regular intervals so that current players do not loose interest but the responsibles should be chosen carefully who are active and capable of carrying out a "successful" event.

No point of talking about VCMP related ADs right now since most of the links on the vcmp website/forum are down including the most important wiki that can put some wrong thought in the mind on newcomers. However there are mirrors available (thanks to Thijn) but that cuts down the players again reaching to it.

One thing still I dont like about devs are not ready to accept new people in development. VCMP devs should invite new active players and divide the tasks of controlling the downtime. They should also take the responsibility of appointing proper people before going "inactive". I still remember (SLC) who was very capable of carrying out the dev work but for some very reason and weird decision, he was not taken in, otherwise the situation would have been a lot of different by now.

PS: Anyone has any idea where are the devs missing as they were supposed to be back by may/june for new summer updates like previous years that created interest in the community.

[morphine]

also - (one of) two reasons why the average VC:MP player does not care about beta testers anymore:

• they are inactive
• they are silent and as 'current community administrators', don't give the average VC:MP player the consolidation in faith they need for them to rest assured that VC:MP is still alive and kicking

Sorry to be so blunt morph
.
.
.

I take no offense in you being blunt, in fact it was actually what I was aiming for in one way or another.

to me, it's all about real(-time) information and I was merely pointing out things the way I personally saw them...

...as was/is everybody else here. what we're about here is discussion and fact-checking on the side.

[aXXo]

Charley, how about you modify your idea and try to lean it towards Discord? That way, we won't need to reconstruct any existing infrastructure, instead it will be a fresh start.

VCMP does not have an official Discord server. We could use one.
There is an unofficial one, but it is heavily inclined towards scripting just like the VCMP forum.

From what I've experienced, Discord acts as a good platform for any community. Even VU forum's popularity and usage has declined since Discord came into being. It does most of the stuff that a forum does and more. The invite link is easy to advertise, so we might get some new player intake.

What VCMP lacks the most is new player retention. I hope if the noobs have a platform where they can engage with the community, it will help with the retention. I agree with Charley that the VCMP forum is not a very happening place for anyone who doesnt care about scripting. My suggestion is to create a new platform rather than trying to get keys to the old one.

[mairee]

One thing still I dont like about devs are not ready to accept new people in development. VCMP devs should invite new active players and divide the tasks of controlling the downtime. They should also take the responsibility of appointing proper people before going "inactive". I still remember (SLC) who was very capable of carrying out the dev work but for some very reason and weird decision, he was not taken in, otherwise the situation would have been a lot of different by now.

Let's talk about this topic a bit.

As far as I remember, SLC no longer has the time or interest to engage in VCMP development. I'm pretty sure the same applies to Murdock and Shad. That leaves us with a question, what option do they have? There's Zurix but I doubt if VCMP devs would ever appoint him due to not knowing him much. Who else is there?

[GangstaRas]

One thing still I dont like about devs are not ready to accept new people in development. VCMP devs should invite new active players and divide the tasks of controlling the downtime. They should also take the responsibility of appointing proper people before going "inactive". I still remember (SLC) who was very capable of carrying out the dev work but for some very reason and weird decision, he was not taken in, otherwise the situation would have been a lot of different by now.

Let's talk about this topic a bit.

As far as I remember, SLC no longer has the time or interest to engage in VCMP development. I'm pretty sure the same applies to Murdock and Shad. That leaves us with a question, what option do they have? There's Zurix but I doubt if VCMP devs would ever appoint him due to not knowing him much. Who else is there?

The rest of us to get even more gifted and upgrade our VCMP resumes thats what  .

But maybe Murdock could come around though, he's been asking me of 3D modeling tips and tricks.....I mean that's hope right there right?

[Luckshya]

As far as I remember, SLC no longer has the time or interest to engage in VCMP development. I'm pretty sure the same applies to Murdock and Shad. That leaves us with a question, what option do they have? There's Zurix but I doubt if VCMP devs would ever appoint him due to not knowing him much. Who else is there?

I think SLC said that because there's nothing he could contribute to vcmp now. He gave us a great squirrel plugin - SqMod and had nothing to do now, so obviously he lost interest and said that. I think if he will be asked again, he will surely give it a second thought. I remember when I asked him about it recently and his answer was not a straight NO.

[ferrari32]

So promotion and income of new players plus lowering the skill gap for newbies..

Maybe a youtube series of tutorials made by a team rather than 1 person. Group the top fighters and respected players together and make a how to basic for vcmp, complete with good editing skills.

[krystianoo]

This is a pointless discussion. It is more than sure that VCMP beta testers have been pitching names with a potential for the developer position.

Charley, as long as VCMP beta testers and, consequently, developers don't agree to your idea, nothing will happen.

NewK comes here and tells us how 10 years ago people also used to say VCMP was dying and to back it up with proof. Well, there's the proof. We are at an all-time low.



I don't care about Vice War getting 90 players. I want to open the browser and be able to join any server at any time, instead of having to ask people to join EAD or CTF so we can have fun.

You guys can "believe" NewK's words but the truth is that 0.4.7 was supposed to come out one year ago and the fact that nothing has ever been publicly said or announced about it since then should make you think.

Sure, you might have had 27 or 99 private releases. You might have had plans to promote the mod. Ok? But the average player has seen nothing of it and it doesn't look like they will.

I believe that part of the problem indeed is the VC-MP forum. I google "gta vice city multiplayer" and this is the first result -

This page, imho, has to be refined. Player retention is important and the links should be updated, the images should be cooler, there should be a brief list of servers with descriptions for newbies, an option to read all that in another language. We're a small multiplayer mod and we can allow ourselves for all that.

VCMP does not have an official Discord server. We could use one.

I agree.